Joshua Topolsky has planted his tanks squarely on Arianna Huffington's lawn. The outgoing editor of AOL-owned technology site Engadget is to launch a new gadget news site – and is taking eight of Engadget's core team with him.

The as-yet-unnamed site will launch later this year under the somewhat unfamiliar umbrella of SB Nation, the network of US sports blogs chaired by Jim Bankoff. (It was Bankoff, lest we forget, who brought Topolsky and Engadget to AOL six years ago.)

On the face of it, Topolsky and co. are leaving one big corporate entity to join another big corporate entity. So far, so dull. But Topolsky's new venture should, in theory, be allowed to blossom where Engadget was hamstrung. Huffington, freshly charged with leading AOL's new "journalism-heavy" content strategy, will have a keen eye on the site.

We have been working on blogging technology that was developed in 2003, we haven't made a hire since I started running the site, and I thought we could be more successful elsewhere. We had done what we could with the resources that were given to us and taken it as far as it would go. I know and trust Jim [Bankoff], and he gets what we do. After looking under the hood of what they have in terms of technology, we're very excited about what we will be able to do there.

Topolsky announced he was leaving Engadget early last month, in the aftermath of the leaked "AOL Way" memo, which detailed in blistering cynicism how its content should be optimised for the web. One or two editors left because of it and, although Topolsky is thought not to be one of them, the fallout continues.

But beyond the technology (and possibly more important than the technology), there's another factor here that's driving my decision. It's that SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam — a point we couldn't be more aligned on.

• Elsewhere in the revolving doors of technology sites, Owen Thomas, the executive editor of VentureBeat, is leaving to found The Daily Dot, a "bold experiment in crowdsourced journalism".